The Wharton Plot, page 7
“I would have to read it,” she hedged. Unhappy, she looked at the manuscript. The thing looked a foot high, and she suspected it was all single-spaced. “And I can’t take it with me. It’s far too heavy.”
“I wouldn’t let you take it. It’s returning to the publisher tomorrow.”
This was better news, giving Edith an excellent excuse to visit the Appleton offices. And, she realized with relief, another postponement of her day with Teddy.
“In that case, I shall speak with Mr. Jewett tomorrow.”
“Thank you. Thank you, Mrs. Wharton.”
She looked back at the title page. “What is in this book that terrifies people so, Mrs. Frevert?”
“The truth, Mrs. Wharton.”
Biting her tongue on Ah, yes, the truth! she said, “You are a very good sister.”
“Graham was a far better brother.”
As they emerged from Mr. Phillips’s sanctum, she saw Walter regaling the beauteous Mrs. Walling with tales of Egypt, where he had just been stationed. Edith knew Walter’s taste. He enjoyed tiny pretty women who adorned themselves with great skill, dubbing them “fairies.” Mrs. Walling wasn’t a fairy, but she was extremely attractive. Edith also noticed that across the room, William Walling was watching as his captivating spouse ran rings around yet another man.
Why yet? she questioned herself. Why did she assume this scene had played out before?
Oh, because Mrs. Walling had bold eyes and a bewitching figure and Mr. Walling a weak chin and no spark. It wasn’t any more complicated than that. The heady whiff of conspiracy was affecting her. Working her way through the crush, Edith intervened, saying she regretted ending what was clearly a fascinating conversation, but they must go.
Taking her by the elbow, Anna Walling asked, “What did you think of Graham’s study, Mrs. Wharton?”
“Impressive. Tragic.”
“Did you and Mrs. Frevert discuss anything else?”
Edith realized: Anna Walling had known the purpose of the study visit all along. Had, in fact, invited her back to the house for that very reason.
“We did. I will read the book, advocate for it if I can do so sincerely. But I’m sure it won’t be necessary. Mrs. Frevert’s fears for the manuscript are groundless…”
“They’re not.”
Annoyed by the interruption, Edith said, “You seem an intelligent woman, Mrs. Walling. Please don’t encourage his sister’s fantasies of dark forces who want to block Susan Lenox. The worst any book has to fear is neglect from the publisher and indifference from the public.”
They were at the door. Edith prepared her farewells, but Anna Walling followed her out of the apartment, closing the door behind her to say, “Even when its author has been murdered?”
“I highly doubt the lunatic who murdered Mr. Phillips has read his work. Most likely, he didn’t even know who he was.”
Mrs. Walling grew agitated, as if it were heresy to cast doubt on the dead man’s renown. “I hope you are right, Mrs. Wharton. I hope Graham was not murdered by anyone who knew him.”
She glanced at the closed door, worried she might be overheard as she added, “Or his work.”
Feeling that marked the end of the discussion, Edith took a step toward the stairs.
But Mrs. Walling was not finished. “In the unlikely event that you are wrong, and I am right, I beg you to take care. They have already killed one writer. I should be very sad if the author of The House of Mirth were the second.”
CHAPTER TEN
Walter was not familiar with the newest feature of the city, the taxicab, and he proved singularly inept at hailing one. First he stood. Then he raised an elegant finger. Next his walking stick. Every car passed them by. Stunned, he stooped to the vulgarity of waving his gloved hand, perhaps an inch from side to side.
Watching him, helpless on the street corner, Edith felt the wild impatience that came to her when she was kept still by other people. She had never expected to be in New York this long, or else she would have brought one of her own motors from Lenox. More for the chance to move than anything else, she suggested they try closer to Gramercy Park.
Just as they were about to turn off Nineteenth Street, Edith saw the Wallings emerge from the building. She lingered, wanting to see if they were any more skilled at taxi catching. The pair stood for a long moment. Then Mr. Walling grasped his wife’s hand. Her head lowered, her eyes closed, Anna Walling’s whole aspect was one of resistance. He murmured something, but it failed to please. Anna Walling abruptly pulled her hand out of his and walked away. He watched her, shoulders slumped, hands loose at his side, before walking in the opposite direction.
“What on earth was that comedy?” Walter whispered. Edith shushed him, nudging him around the corner before they were seen.
Walter took up position on the northwest corner of Gramercy Park. Unwilling to watch him flail, Edith drew closer to the iron gate. Between the bars, she watched a young nurse, not much older than her two charges, play blindman’s bluff, a scarf tied over her eyes. She wandered, arms outstretched, hands reaching, her steps tentative in heavy skirts, as she called out to the playmates she could not see. The children, a boy and a girl, capered around her, drawing close, then leaping away when her stiff arms swung suddenly their way. Their laughter echoed over the chill air, gleeful and imperial.
Happy, thought Edith. She had been allowed inside the park once or twice when she was a child. It was a pokey little place. One would walk right through it and not think twice if not for the fence that made it feel so inaccessible.
The nurse had managed to capture the boy, throwing her arms around his chest and swinging him side to side. The boy’s eyes were closed, his head lolled against the young woman’s body. The little girl hopped up and down, proud that she was still at liberty but envious; the nurse and the boy were now a pair and she left out.
Suddenly tired of waiting, Edith advanced to the curb. Lifting her arm, she turned the full majesty of her form in the direction of an oncoming car. It stopped immediately. Walter, stony and silent, opened the door and they climbed in.
All the way back to the hotel, he rebuked her for wasting his day by dragging him to a funeral of a writer he had never heard of, and she herself thought talentless.
She said, “You seemed partly consoled by Mrs. Walling. That was in poor taste, Walter. No wonder she and her husband quarreled.”
“I was making myself pleasant. The woman’s an anarchist. No doubt she would have thrown a bomb at me directly afterwards.”
A thing she loved in Walter, he never addressed her as a child, assuming she knew what he meant by afterwards and chuckling when she said perhaps it would depend on the quality of the before.
“Do you think she has lovers?” she asked.
“One heard rumors about Jack London. Why?”
“I find myself curious as to the women in David Graham Phillips’s life. He was an attractive man, successful. And yet he wasn’t married.”
“I am not married,” Walter pointed out.
She smiled to reassure him: yes, he was also attractive and successful. “His sister wished to show me his work. She has concerns.”
“About?”
“She thinks Mr. Phillips was murdered to stop his next book.” Ignoring Walter’s derisive bark, she added, “She worries there will be efforts to block its publication.”
“What does she expect you to do?”
“… Advocate for it? I said I would have to read it first.”
“Simple enough to say, ‘Oh, dear, no time, I’m afraid.’”
“I suppose so. But if I can be helpful…” Aware of his disapproval, she cast about for justification. Memories of Dante returned and she said, “‘The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.’”
“Neutrality? Despite the lofty talk of paladins and princes of corruption, the death of Mr. Phillips sounds like an everyday robbery gone wrong. Hardly a great moral crisis.”
“Isn’t it? Doesn’t it disturb you, Walter, that a man can be shot in broad daylight in New York City and we all just go about our business? I mean, guns. This isn’t the Wild West.”
“New York City is in America,” said Walter. “In America, we have guns. From the musket of the Revolution and Custer’s rifle to Booth’s pistol and little Johnny’s Daisy repeater, firearms are part of our history. Who we are. I believe someone just shot the mayor this August. In New Jersey, of all places.”
He smiled, inviting her to join his amusement over New Jersey. On a short angry sigh, she said, “It is possible to care too little, Walter.”
His answer was silence. Edith prepared a retraction. But what she had said was true. And perhaps something Walter needed to hear from her. Still. Overly harsh and she was about to say so when he put a firm hand on hers and said, “Leave it. Tell me what you mean to do about Teddy.”
His hand had trembled slightly as he reached for her. Looking at it over her gloved fingers, she said, “Tell me what I mean to do about Teddy.”
“You mean to leave him,” he said. “And you should.”
There was a bass note in his tone that would have surprised those who dismissed Walter Berry as an effete dilettante, a thrumming insistence that took her back to that moment when she first saw him and knew she had never seen such a beautiful man. Silver blond, slim and precise as a rapier, he seemed created rather than born. She had asked him to look at some of her stories. He had laughed appreciatively with the very first page and she was thrilled. Even more thrilled when he said, “Come, let’s see what can be done.”
Hand twisting in his, she said, “You didn’t use to say so.”
“He didn’t use to be so ill.”
It was what she wanted to hear, and yet she fought. “He is mostly harmless…”
“On the contrary, he is doing you considerable harm. You are in rags. Insisting Henry, Fullerton, and I fly to your side, begging our advice—why? To tell you what you already know. How many books do you owe Scribner’s?”
Feeling accused, she said, “I give them a book a year. I just published a collection of stories.”
“Ghost tales. Where is the novel?”
If she blamed Teddy for the delay, that would only prove his point. She could not admit her fear that she no longer understood New York. And there were other reasons the work had been put off, other terrors to which she could not admit.
They retreated to their separate sides of the cab, each looking out the window at their own view. Worried the journey would end before they were friends again, she tried to think of common ground and found it in Henry—so melancholy after the death of his brother and despondent over the failure of the New York Edition, a much-heralded collection of his life’s work that had been greeted with a vast shrug from the public.
“You and I must discuss what to do for Henry.”
“His heart is broken, Edith. Don’t make it worse by shoving.”
“His bank account is broken,” she said crisply. “That, we can do something about.”
A wave of the hand rejected her plan to plan. Edith fumed. She detested when things were not as they should be, especially when people said, Ah, well, nothing to be done. She thought of Carolyn Frevert darting here and there in her brother’s study, her hand clutching Edith’s as she begged her to fight for his last work. Her fears were ridiculous, blown up by grief, as Anna Walling’s were by radical grievance. But in both women, there was a feeling of purpose that drew her.
“Come with me to the opera next week,” Walter said. “Opening night gala for Natoma. Alice will be there. The Harrimans and Goelets.”
“I saw Alice last night. That was enough.” She recalled that awful young man: Are you making a joke? How strange that they had been talking of David Graham Phillips, of all things …
The cab arrived at the hotel. Giving Walter a gentle kiss on the cheek, she got out of the taxi and proceeded to the lobby.
“This is only running away,” he called after her.
She looked back.
“Your fretting about Mr. Phillips and who killed him. You’re miserable and want to get free of an intolerable situation. If we were abroad, you’d get in your car and drive somewhere until you could think clearly about your future. As that’s not possible, you’re toodling off in your mind. But to the wrong destination. The murder of David Graham Phillips isn’t a sublime garden or majestic ruin. It’s a squalid back alley in a small provincial town.”
In the long moment it took her to answer, she watched a pigeon with filthy, tattered wings make its way along the sidewalk. It strutted to the curb, then, surprisingly, took flight. She smelled the fetid water that had gathered in the gutter, felt the inexorable, dull-witted tremors of the subway. Looking across the street, she saw they had torn down the lovely old Baxter house, thrown up a twelve-story monstrosity in its place. Her view of it was obscured by wires, of course. Crisscrossing, dangling, tangled wires.
“New York is a small provincial town,” she told Walter. “One of those places where we all know one another. Where we must keep secrets. And secrets are just stories. As for what people do in back alleys, well…”
She looked at her old friend. “Secrets and stories, Walter. What writer would not seek that out?”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Edith awoke the next morning feeling bold and defiant. She ate a grand breakfast, then filled several pages with a speed and bravura befitting a master swordsman. Normally when she wrote that well, she felt a pleasant exhaustion. Deserving of tea or a long, slow walk in the garden. Today, her appetite for work was boundless. In a fit of good will, she told White she and Teddy would visit the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals that afternoon. Then she called the bellboy to give Choumai a trot around the block. “Mind, he picks up things from the street. You must pull them from his mouth. He may bite, but his teeth are minuscule, you’ll barely feel it.”
After that, she set her mind on what to wear to the Appleton offices.
She had, she told herself, ample reason to visit Mr. Jewett at Appleton. She had promised—hadn’t she?—Mrs. Frevert. That lady’s eccentric fears about her brother’s murder could not be helped. But Edith could certainly advocate that Mr. Phillips’s last work be published as he had written it, not censored nor bowdlerized. Also—was it not her duty to make sure that the overwhelmed and underworldly Mrs. Frevert had her interests protected? Edith had never heard that Appleton actively cheated their authors. Of course publishers did so little actively, conducting their, which was to say her, business with a delicacy that bordered on languor, if not outright neglect …
She paused to remind herself that her frustrations with Scribner’s were not the point.
But if the Bible instructed one to protect the widows and orphans … well, Mrs. Frevert seemed to be both and so doubly in need of aid. It was the right thing to do, Edith instructed herself. As a woman and an author.
Before leaving her suite, she telephoned Henry James in his rooms on the twelfth floor. “I’m going to pay a visit to Rutger Bleecker Jewett at Appleton. I thought you might like to come with me. Venture to new pastures to see if, perchance, they really are greener.”
HJ was never not expressive, even in silence. His pause was a low chord on the piano, full of foreboding.
“Come,” she insisted. “Mr. Jewett will be impressed.”
A deep rumbling sigh. “Not by me. Not anymore. You go. When you return on the whirlwind of your determination, come and tell me how it went.”
“If I have time,” she said, tetchy. This was an evasion. Trapped in New York, awaiting Teddy’s doctor, she had nothing but time.
One thing she already liked about Appleton: They spent money. Lavishly. Too lavishly, some might say. The company had been placed into receivership ten years ago. They had recently moved to handsome new offices on Fifth Avenue and Thirty-Ninth Street, only a few blocks from the Belmont. To buck up her confidence before meeting a new editor, Edith perused the window of a bookshop, hoping to see Tales of Men and Ghosts prominently displayed. Instead, piled high and triumphant, was the latest Mary Roberts Rinehart mystery, The Window at the White Cat. Crowded around that book was Mrs. Rinehart’s huge success of a few years ago, The Circular Staircase.
Of Edith’s books, there was no sign. Scribner’s, she thought darkly, should be held to account. It would do them good to have a rival for her affections.
But her hopes of a grand welcome were quickly dashed. The juvenile at the reception desk struck her as too young to be able to read, much less work in publishing. Also apparently too young to know or care who she was. He made it clear: Edith was neither expected nor planned for, and so she was a problem and would have to sit until he could decide what to do with her. It had been many years since her name failed to gain entrance, and while she knew very well she should have made an appointment, Edith was miffed. She took a seat but planned revenge. An offer from Appleton moved down several places on her list of things she wanted; then moved several places back up, if only so she might dismiss them as she now felt dismissed. The chairs were offensive, built to accommodate a man’s slim trousers, rather than a lady’s skirts. The infant at the front desk was insufferable. Surveying the bookshelves on the nearby wall, where the pride of the house was displayed, she noted The Red Badge of Courage, by Mr. Crane. Works by Mr. Kipling and Mr. Darwin. Both sides of the Civil War were represented in books by Jefferson Davis and General Sherman. The sole female on the shelf was Mr. Carroll’s invention, Alice.
There was a chance this visit had been a mistake.
In fairness, there did seem to be some sort of meeting taking place. From beyond the glass-paned door, she could hear voices, one vague and mollifying, the other barking and agitated. She tried to pick out words, but every time the barker got up speed, the murmurer was able to break his momentum. Shouting was not the usual thing at publishing houses, and she leaned forward, intrigued. But there were doors and walls between her and the argument, and to her annoyance, she couldn’t make it out. She looked to the young gentleman, now neatly folding letters into envelopes. He raised his brows to acknowledge the discord but said nothing.
